(NOLA) Louisiana’s top education official wants schools to crack down on misbehavior when students return, arguing that stricter discipline will restore order and promote learning.
In a memo Monday, state Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley urged school district leaders to “recommit to assertive discipline” when the new school year begins next month. He also highlighted two new state laws: one that makes it easier for teachers to remove disruptive students; and another that requires schools to expel students for certain offenses.
The push for stricter school discipline mirrors efforts in other Republican-led states to target student misbehavior, which spiked during the pandemic. It marks a sharp turn away from past attempts to reduce suspensions and expulsions by adopting less-punitive discipline practices, which critics say tied educators’ hands and created unruly classrooms.
“The passive, softer approach is not working,” Brumley said in an interview. “My commitment is to restore law and order to the classroom.”
The discipline shift parallels changes to the criminal justice system championed by Gov. Jeff Landry, a conservative Republican who pushed a slew of tough-on-crime bills through the Legislature this year in the name of public safety. Landry said earlier this year that schools also should crack down on rule breakers.
“A disruptive class is not a productive class,” he said at an event in May marking the release of teacher-proposed policy recommendations, including ones to make it easier to push out misbehaving students. “We want to bring some discipline back into those classrooms.”
Advocates fear that the move toward zero-tolerance discipline will make schools quicker to punish students without trying to address the causes of their misbehavior, such as stressful family situations or learning difficulties. They also worry the new laws and policies will worsen Louisiana’s glaring discipline disparities.
In the 2022-23 school year, the most recent for which data is available, about 13% of Black students in the state’s public schools received in-school suspensions — double the rate among White students. According to state data, the top cause of such suspensions was “willful disobedience,” a vague offense that critics say is sometimes enforced in a subjective or biased way.
Terry Landry Jr., Louisiana policy director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights advocacy group, pointed to research showing that Black students and low-income students are punished more harshly than their peers for the same infractions. Students who are suspended are more likely to drop out of school and to be arrested and incarcerated as adults.
“That’s just really concerning for us to hear,” Terry Landry said about the memo urging schools to adopt “assertive” discipline policies. “It adds to the school-to-prison pipeline that we've fighting against for years.”
The first law that Brumley’s memo cited, Act 400, requires teachers to remove students whose behavior prevents other students from learning or poses a safety risk. The law, which takes effect Aug. 1, also prohibits principals from discouraging teachers against disciplining disruptive students.
The other law Brumley highlighted, Act 337, requires expulsions for students in grades 6-12 who bring guns or drugs to school. It also says middle- and high-school students who are suspended three times in one school year must be expelled, and students who bring tobacco, alcohol or vapes onto school property “may” be expelled.
The get-tough measures are a departure from past efforts to move the state away from punitive discipline policies.
In 2021, the state Department of Education launched a program with Louisiana State University to train school staffers how to respond to students’ social and emotional needs. The program targeted schools with high suspension rates.
In a press release that year, the department said suspensions often result from student misbehavior “caused by circumstances of stress, scarcity, trauma, self-doubt, poverty and classrooms that are not inclusive and fail to provide a sense of cultural belonging.”
"If we can better understand what our kids are going through, where they are coming from, what their beliefs are, then we have a better chance of meeting them where they are and helping them to be successful," Brumley said at the time.
Today, Brumley is calling for a tougher response when students break the rules.
“We should not tolerate simply making excuses for poor behavior,” he said Monday. “We should set an expectation, we should hold our students to that expectation, because that's what the world is going to demand beyond school.”
Regina Humphrey, an assistant principal at Arthur F. Smith Middle Magnet in Rapides Parish, said teachers must walk a fine line between supporting students and holding them accountable. The staff at her school tries to promote good behavior by teaching students how to manage their emotions, providing mentors and deescalating situations when students get upset.
The goal is to do everything possible to avoid removing students from school, said Humphrey, who was part of a state panel that proposed policies to support teachers. But educators must also consider how a single disruptive student can make learning harder for everyone else.
“I love that child,” she said, “but then again, I also have these other 400 kids to think about.”
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